MYTH 2: CHATBOTS ARE EASY TO BUILD

This is both true and false. Chatbots are easy to build and deploy if you have a robust enterprise chatbot platform, personnel with the needed skills and expertise in the areas of AI, Conversational UX etc.

There are a wide range of challenges for developers to understand the purpose of chatbots, design chatbot conversations, frame rules and convert the information into a conversational flowchart, build development platforms or frameworks and integrate it with business apps and ensure the bots are aligned with the business priorities.

If you’re planning to build chatbots in-house for your organization, just remember that there is a lot of work involved to build them! Deployment of a successful chatbot requires a lot of planning and research in advance.

It would be interesting to note that before chatbot platforms were introduced into the market, building a bot was complicated, time-consuming, and required a specific set of sophisticated skills.

However, organizations having domain expertise and AI skills can deploy complex solutions within a short span of 6-8 weeks.

Learn More: Basic Resources Required to Build an Enterprise Chatbot

MYTH 3: CHATBOTS WILL REPLACE MOBILE APPS

Have tablets made smartphones old-fangled? No. Similarly, bots and mobile apps will also co-exist. For example, take ridesharing company Uber – customers can request a cab through an app as well as its Facebook messenger bot. So, it is not quite accurate to say that chatbots can replace apps.

Chatbots provide an easy way to text and request for information, whereas applications are about downloading and storing information. Moreover, chatbots offer textual conversational experience and apps stand for visual experiences. This clearly shows that chatbots will not replace apps with their distinct features. Rather, it appears like they complement each other.

Furthermore, organizations can leverage both bots and apps for their business growth. Besides, chatbots need messaging apps or channels such as Facebook, Slack, Skype for Business to deliver the conversational experience. Chatbots amplify the mobile app experience by giving it a new dimension of interaction.

MYTH 4: CHATBOTS ARE ONLY FOR BIG ORGANIZATIONS

Although artificial intelligence trend is spreading far and wide, many small and mid-sized organizations assume that AI technology is reserved only for large tech-savvy organisations. Assuming the boom of chatbots is only for large organizations is a major misconception.

Recent reports on chatbot market analysis show that AI technology is inspiring startups to incorporate chatbots to achieve definitive success and the mid-scale enterprise segment is expected to grow at the highest CAGR.

Chatbots and AI can be considered as an enhanced channel to streamline operations in small and mid-sized companies. They can go to the optimal extent of delivering responsiveness and efficiency within the organization.

Another misconception connected with this is that building chatbots could be expensive which is a false assertion. There are many powerful bot builder platforms available at an affordable cost. Using these platforms, you can cost-effectively deploy the desired chatbot persona which possesses the potential to cut down varied business costs.

Read More: How AI-powered Enterprise chatbot platforms are transforming the future of work

MYTH 5: CHATBOTS ARE ONLY FOR CUSTOMER SERVICE SECTORS

Most of us consider that the primary function of chatbot is to chat with a customer. This is just fiction! The most common use case for chatbots is answering customer requests but they are not just limited to customer service tasks. There are a lot of different interesting use cases.

Below are a few examples of the most successful chatbot use cases in various sectors.

• HR bots
• CPG bots
• Insurance bots
• Intranet bots
• Marketing bots
• Sales bots etc.

Enterprise-grade chatbots have the ability to deliver optimum results when mapped with an appropriate use case in any industry. Chatbots are poised to disrupt the way we interact within our organization and with our customers.

Read More: Different ways your business can use chatbots

MYTH 6: ALL BOTS USE AI

Many are under the misconception that chatbots use AI and only work with it. The fact is that not all chatbots are AI based, most chatbots are rule-based and follow a simple, autonomous process, something along the lines of a decision tree.

Many organizations prefer these type of chatbots to understand the intent and context of the user. With the capabilities of NLP/ML, they can identify context from the requests typed by users and respond back with a relevant answer as bot trained on a large training set. In order to assist this purpose, chatbots need not be AI-based.

At present, there are three types of chatbots:

1. Script-driven: These rely on pre-defined scripts to answer queries.

1. Interference-driven: Answer based on NLU, deep learning and cognitive learning to respond like humans.

1. Data-driven: They recognize patterns based on previous learnings and respond from catalogued responses.

However, developing a perfect AI-based chatbot is not a simple task as it needs high-end developers and large sets of data on real human conversations.

MYTH 7: CHATBOTS DON’T UNDERSTAND THE CONTEXT

There is a popular myth that chatbots don’t understand a user’s intent and might not always provide the desired response to the user. This is somewhat true for traditional chatbots. However, with the advancements in AI technologies like Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning, chatbots are better able to process user intent and adapt to the jargon to give contextual, personalized and relevant responses with a wide range of vocabulary.